ELIAS BIRYABAREMA
Kampala--Often when accomplished business leaders converge, as in the just concluded Commonwealth Business Forum, CBF at Sheraton Hotel the ideas and issues under discussion tend to be of the highbrow sort. And why not, after all it's business that makes the world grind on. It’s business that makes societies and nations more powerful than others.
Just as a clue to the grandiosity of this business gathering (November 20th-22nd); the marquee to accommodate the over 700 delegates was hired at $400,000 from Dubai.
But don't be deceived by that and feel a great loss in case you've been unable to attend. In fact if you have ever attended any or participated in the CBF, the sense of déjà vu that you feel as you sit in the sessions can be overwhelming.
The Forum opened at 10 AM on Tuesday, November 20th with a speech by President Museveni. Any Ugandan delegate in there could as well have slept through the president's speech, and then woken up and still accurately recounted what he had told the Forum.
Reuters's correspondent, Tim Cocks quoted Museveni as saying, "We have confined ourselves to the export of raw materials such as coffee, where we have been getting $1 per kg while Nestle in London is getting $20 per kg."
But Mr. Cocks could easily have been accused of plagiarism because that's the same exact line that has run in thousands of stories on Museveni and his economic views.
As is well known of what happens when Museveni meets business executives, somehow the talk has to invariably feature his standard themes: value addition; donation of value to Western nations; Western investors’ failure to recognise Africa’s potential; his wisdom in attracting processors of our commodities; Uganda having the best bananas in the world and suchlike.
That would not necessarily be a problem since, as a head of state, his glib musings will always have an audience. The problem is the precious time lost in such trite talk which would otherwise have been better devoted to exploration of more thoughtful and intellectually stimulating ideas.
But may be we're being harsh on Museveni.
The droves of CEOs and economic policy directors at the CBF didn’t fair any better in terms of the freshness of debate and talking points. Almost all the subjects discussed at the CBF are the types on which you have probably attended half a dozen workshops or so. One such one was, "Leveraging ICT for Business Development." An even more stale one was, "enhancing intra-African trade," that was discussed by a seemingly powerful posse of business executives: Dr Yvonne Muthien, Director Special Projects, Coca-Cola, Africa; Jeremy Pike, Area Director, Sub Saharan Africa, BAT and Sir John Kaputin, ACP Secretary General. But the feeling one got after the debate session suggested that power was actually in titles not in their ideas.
In fact the only new element in the deliberations at the CBF was the personalities that tackled these subjects. But that didn’t necessarily make for a higher quality of debate. A Ugandan Journalist, Mr. Daniel Kalinaki of Kalinaki.blogspot.com derided the sessions as “boring,” and suggested that it was a great deal of pain to seat through any of them.
Nevertheless, some subjects that are new to global business discourses did generate a health and educative debate. The unfolding impact of climate change was such a one. A three-member panel—Mr. James Smith, Chairman of Shell, UK, Bobby Godsell, Director Anglo American, South Africa and Mr Reto Schwarwiler, Head of Global Government Relations, Swiss Re, Switzerland—delivered stimulating insights into this emerging threat to the economic prosperity of nations.
The recent floods that pummelled Uganda’s north, north-eastern and central regions in August and September displaced hundreds of thousands and destroyed infrastructure worth billions of shillings. Although debate about the link between global warming and extreme weather incidents is still continuing, there’s already a broad consensus among scientists that rising temperatures might be behind the increasingly frequent flooding ravaging tropical countries.
Hopefully Ugandan government officials at the CBF took this panel’s lessons to heart and will also possibly review some of the policies like allocating of forests to sugar cane and palm oil investors.
Thursday, November 22, 2007
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